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The Dissociated Self: an Archaeological and Genealogical Analysis

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The Dissociated Self: an Archaeological and Genealogical Analysis THE DISSOCIATED SELF: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND GENEALOGICAL ANALYSIS Hillary Uldricks GRAND VALLEY STATE UNIVERSITY Abstract Foucault's work examines how it is that people are shaped by various institutions as well as how people can shape institutions. In this paper I explore Foucault's concept of the self developed. To do this I first examine his archaeological method of analysis followed by his genealogical method of analysis, ultimately ending with his idea of power relations encompassing both. The shift between his archaeological and genealogical method marks the transformation of the empirico-transcendental doublet to the dissociated self. What is unearthed from his genealogical analysis is a network of power relations, a non-place, rendering the self dissociated and the task of constituting the self one of defining oneself within and against these power relations. In this paper I will examine Michel Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical analysis of the self. Archaeology as a method, for Foucault, historically analyzes the human sciences as systems of knowledge with man being the central subject. He examines the way in which various fields and practices such as biology and psychology talk about man from the late 18th century through the early 20th century. In his analysis of historical events, Foucault introduces the conception of the empirico-transcendental doublet. However, Foucault realizes that his archaeological method of analysis isn’t enough to talk about the self. The reason for this is that studying different systems of thought doesn’t account for the shift in one system of thought to another. It is because of this that he develops his genealogical analysis of the self. Genealogy as a method does not search for origins. On the contrary, it is concerned with the lowly, the accidental, the coincidental, and the disparate. It sets up a counter lens through which to view history, which has typically been understood in terms of progress and teleology. Foucault’s genealogical method leads him to give an account of how the dissociative self emerged in the West. He later discusses the ways in which we can use technologies of the self to craft our identities in a matrix of power relations. In this paper I will seek to examine the ways in which Foucault’s idea of power relations encompasses his archaeological and genealogical analysis of the self. In The Order of Things Foucault presents archaeology as a method for historical analysis of the human sciences as disciplinary systems of knowledge. These systems of knowledge, for Foucault, are both fields of study and systems of control. Archaeological analysis involves examining conditions of possibilities in particular epistemes. Conditions of possibility can be thought of as the discursive practices that allowed for the establishment of those systems of knowledge. Epistemes can be thought of as conceptual frameworks through which an era or society views the world. Oftentimes the meaning and implications behind these epistemes are not very straightforward or clear. We often take for granted the ways in which we understand and view the world. The work of archaeology then is the work of unearthing these understandings in particular epistemes, to examine the implications of systems of knowledge and how they interact with, impose upon, and affect the conceptual framework not just of populations, or societies, but of individuals within those populations and societies. Archaeology is a neutral examination of conceptual frameworks in their historical situatedness without claiming transcendence of that history or objectivity. Two epistemes he gives considerable attention to are those of the Classical and Modern ages. Language plays a large role in his examination of the two epistemes. Comparing a shift in discourse from the Classical to the Modern episteme accounts for man being thought of as an empirico-transcendental doublet. Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 2013 The Dissociated Self The dissolution of discourse seems to mark the shift between the Classical and Modern episteme. Foucault writes, “When discourse ceased to exist and to function within representation as the first means means of ordering it, Classical thought ceased at the same time to be directly accessible to us.”1 Classical discourse was the relationship between meaning and being. The representation of the Classical age found unity between a word and its being, or thing. The end of the Classical age is marked by the dissolution of discourse. The unity of representation shattered into the disparity of resemblances. The consequence of the separation of a word from a thing, or object, in language was the separation of meaning and being for man. Modern language becomes historical and the meaning of signs becomes relative to a specific discourse. It led to the separation of man from himself. To suggest that something is outside man is to suggest that something is inside man, thus the birth of the Modern empirico- transcendental man. It is in the Modern episteme that man is, “a being such that knowledge will be attained in him, of what renders all knowledge possible.”2 The Modern episteme saw the emergence, or birth, of man as an epistemological concept. The inside-outside dichotomy of man suggests man as an origin. Man becomes both a subject and an object. The empirico-transcendental doublet, then, is the subject that also becomes an object. The self as an empirico-transcendental doublet becomes an object of various systems of knowledge maintaining its subjectivity by its realization of its objectivity. The self, in this case, can become an object of both systems of knowledge and an object of itself, all the while realizing it is both a subject and an object. The self then becomes an antinomical transcendental condition of possibility for the scientific investigation of humans and the empirical objects of scientific study. It is because man is both a subject and an object of knowledge that both the birth and imminent end of man is conceived. Man becomes “a face doomed to be erased in the course of history,” and so “Man’s finitude is heralded—and imperiously so—in the positivity of knowledge,” which “promises the very infinity it refuses.”3 Finitude thus becomes a foundation for scientific disciplines. In other words, man’s being is the foundation of scientific disciplines because it is by becoming an object of knowledge that he realizes this finitude and then establishes these disciplines as a subject that both imposes finitude upon himself and promises the infinite, in the establishment of those disciplines. Man no longer searches for the origin of the Classical episteme but finds the origin of the Modern episteme in himself, which ultimately falls under the invisible ordering of things. It is in constituting scientific disciplines from the inside that man comes to understand himself through the outside, which Foucault acknowledges leaves a haunting question, “Does man really exist?”4 The analytic of (human) finitude leaves us with a very interesting phenomenon: “Western culture has constituted, under the name of man, a being who, by one and the same interplay of reasons, must be a positive domain of knowledge and cannot be an object of science.”5 When stripped of these positivities, or disciplines, what is left? Can man survive this? In examining both the Classical and Modern epistemes Foucault unearths the conditions of possibility in each episteme, out of which the empirico-transcendental man arose. This is the archaeological analysis of man. The Modern episteme both gave birth to and promised the end of man. However, an archaeological analysis cannot pinpoint the manner in which man will become extinct, it can only speculate. The end of The Order of Things ends with this sentiment: If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility—without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises—were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), 304. Hereafter OT. 2 Ibid., 318. 3 Ibid., 313-314. 4 Ibid., 322. 5 Ibid., 366-367. 48 Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.6 This is the concluding statement of The Order of Things. The end of man is the end of the intelligibility of the concept of man. Foucault leaves us with a question of origin and identity, which ultimately paves the way for his genealogical method of analysis. The archaeological analysis of man as an empirico-transcendental is a crucial step in the process of thinking of man as a dissociated self by means of the genealogical method. Foucault incorporates two of Nietzsche’s variations of the word Ursprung (origin), Herkunft (descent) and Entstehung (emergence) to explicate his methodology of genealogy. However, the ironical way in which Nietzsche uses the concept of origin is illustrated in the history of reason, noting that, “Examining the history of reason, [one] learns that it was born in an altogether ‘reasonable’ fashion—from chance; devotion to truth and the precision of scientific methods arose from the passion of scholars.”7 This is to say that if one were to push reason to its origins, one would ultimately find there is no origin, at least not in the Classical sense. Reason arose by chance, out of disparity. The history of reason cannot be traced back to an essence of reason, but to “a spirit of competition.”8 The origin thus becomes something entirely different: disparity, dissociation, and lowly beginnings are found in place of timeless essences or ideologies, operating in a teleological manner, of lofty beginnings.
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